(no subject)
the first cut is the deepest | pg-13 | ~3k | fem!jongin-centric (but there's potential, if you squint)
for the femmexo exchange. good god i love you guys. sorry it's messy and doesn't have much point i just? have? so many feelings about this 'verse? and didn't want to ramble on for eight thousand pages. bless.
The first time Jongeun teleports, she's not even entirely sure that she's in a different place. She considered it, at the time, a combination of mild depression and sheer exhaustion, but really it had a lot to do with the whole disorientation aspect of it. Being settled into one atmosphere only to be jerked into another does a number on a person, after all, especially when it's accompanied by the sensation of being felt up by a million complete strangers.
She's sitting outside the studio where she goes for extra dance practice -- always putting in the extra hours, she supposes, eyeing her much older comrades in rehearsal and noting that not a single one of them are a part of the company she's in at her high school -- with her schoolbag between her knees and her chin tucked into her chest when she realises that she's missed the last bus home by exactly three and a half minutes. While she, in all her politeness, is forced to acknowledge and even respect the punctuality that is the bus schedule, she still hangs her head in disappointment, knowing that she'll never be able to make it home. A glance overhead tells her that the night is far too long to call her parents and ask for a ride; they're not horribly into the fact that she spends more time practicing dance than taking cram school seriously, anyhow, and she'd hate to be a burden on them more than she already feels she is.
The people on the street, while scattered and quite alone and some rather intimidating, offer some promise; she's just about to think of talking to them, ever the optimist, when her one actual friend in the studio, the ultimately gorgeous and totally-crushworthy-if-Jongeun-were-into-perfect-people Hyoyeon, sits right next to her. "You did really well today," the older woman compliments softly, patting Jongeun on the shoulder.
Suddenly stricken with shyness, Jongeun tucks her chin into her chest to hide her smile and the blush that tickles at the apples of her cheeks. "Thank you," she answers in a mumble. "You were amazing, too, like you usually are."
"Usually?" Hyeyeon laughs, shaking her head, "No, today was pretty off for me. I couldn't keep count to save my life." She reaches out and taps Jongeun's temple fondly. "You're the one that everyone was watching."
"Like anyone would ever see me when someone like you is around." It comes off as a little bitter, but she can't help the way that the jealousy forces its way up her spine, straightening her so she doesn't look weak in front of her senior and, more importantly, competitor. "The auditions for the summer performances are coming up soon. I wouldn't be surprised if you got the lead."
Hyeyeon's quiet for a long while, then finally she nods, bumping Jongeun's shoulder with her own. "You missed the bus again, didn't you. D'you need a ride?"
And Jongeun really, really, really wants to say yes, but her pride, or at least what little she has, doesn't allow her, instead shoves the word right back down her throat. "No, I'm, um, waiting for my mom to come get me. I called her right before I hit the showers."
"Ah... alright!" And Hyeyeon's sunny, just enough to light up the darkness immediately surrounding them. "I'll see you on Friday, Jongeunnie. Please take care of yourself until then?"
There's a certain amount of shame that comes with rejecting a perfectly nice offer, but it disappears as soon as she's watching the sway of the older's hips as she walks away. Now she's biting her tongue, trying not to call out about how much her hatred fills her, how much she'd like to be the other female, to be that talented and gracious and amazing. She settles for a whisper. "I hate you."
Winching her eyes shut, she curls up on the ground, arms tucked neatly under her knees and chin tucked upon them, wishing she could be anywhere, literally anywhere but here. Her thumb brushes along the thick material of her dance costume, powder-pink tights, deep blue leotard, flowy white skirt. She looks like a cartoon, she supposes, except a cartoon in real life would more than likely get noticed, and probably a few offers from strangers for some assistance.
Why can't she be anywhere else?
A shudder runs through her and it feels like there are a thousand hands running over her skin, fingers brushing against places where she never thought to be touched, cold and clammy and not that different from death. Is she dying? Has something killed her and she hadn't even been paying attention to notice? She silently bemoans the impermanence of both her attention span and life at large -- she would be the person that didn't notice they were in some kind of brutal accident or something and just float on, untroubled, to the afterlife.
It's only when she hears the voice, high-pitched and dainty with the faintest hint of a lisp, that she opens her eyes -- and realises that she's not in the place she just was at all, though the surrounding isn't horribly different. Glancing down at herself, she pinches her stomach, winces at the contact -- okay, good, she isn't dead. Then she turns her attention in the direction of the complete stranger who's apparently been the only witness to this sudden change in geographical orientation. "Hey, what the hell," the voice says; Jongeun rests her eyes on the source, a (rather tall) girl, bleach-blonde, clad in black, face covered in piercings, shoulders smattered with artwork made of ink. "You weren't just here a second ago, were you?" Her speech is accented, cutely so, and it makes Jongeun want to taste every word that comes out of her mouth.
"I don't... think I was, no," Jongeun confesses breathlessly, shaking her head and staring down at the ground, trying her hardest not to notice that the stranger she'd probably scared is extremely pretty.
"How'd you do it...?" Except this girl doesn't look or sound scared at all. "I mean, that was...kind of amazing, yeah."
"Amazing?!" Jongeun's calm veneer, or what little of it she'd had, disappears in a high-pitched squeal. "No, that was not amazing, what's happening to me, why is everything in my life going weird, who are you and why aren't you freaked out--"
"Hey, hey," and the girl stoops beside her, fitting an arm around her shoulders and leaning in so close that her lips brush Jongeun's ear, "everything is...fine, yes."
"How can you say that," Jongeun sighs softly, hanging her head and quickly wriggling out of the embrace, happy to be away from any comfort that involves too much touching by a pretty girl whose name she has yet to learn. "You don't even know what happened to me. I don't even know what happened to me."
"I might," the girl says, careful of space now, keeping her arms tucked into her side. Her Korean is stilted, cautious, as if she's afraid she might accidentally say something awkward and offend Jongeun. "I mean... I don't know, some weird stuff has been happening to me lately. I have this friend who is going through the same thing."
Jongeun, concerned, reaches out and places her hand in the crook of the other girl's elbow, fingers drumming against the faint remnants of her pulse. "Tell me about it, then. I'm... I'm afraid. I don't want to be anything I can't control."
"You...may want to meet my friend, then," says the stranger, reaching out and brushing a strand of hair from Jongeun's forehead. "Come with me, I can take you to where she lives, and she can tell you more than I can."
"Another one?" Juyeon, the person in question, has this little wrinkle between her eyebrows, which doesn't befit someone who looks her age, at least in Jongeun's opinion. The older girl rubs her forehead with her palm, then tugs the blanket up around her, using her bottom lip to blow her blunted, blondish bangs from her eyes. "That's the third one this week, Yutao, you're going to need to stop bringing them over whenever you find them. Especially if you don't know whether or not their powers, if that's what they are, are real. The other day you brought someone to my house because you saw two cats follow them all the way home."
"But--" Yutao's studded lower lip juts out in about the cutest pout Jongeun's ever seen in her life. "I just...thought I would help. Especially cat girl."
"'Cat girl' had a name," Juyeon reminds Yutao, patient though her feelings are clearly wearing thin. "Her name was Hyeri and she had her leftover lunch dishes in her bag, which is why she had cats on her. They were following the smell of kimbap until they got fed."
Yutao looks embarrassed, glancing down at her hands, where she's wearing about seven rings and as many bracelets. Jongeun's overwhelmed with the possibility that she might actually be able to hold them without wanting to be ill, Yutao has been that sweet to her. She kind of zones out, actually, tracing the lines of Yutao's black manicure, eyebrows pinched together as she contemplates learning the shape of each of those fingers with her own--
"Jongeun?" Yutao is asking, lifting her hand right out of Jongeun's line of vision to snap her fingers in front of the younger's face. "Hey, are you alright?"
"Huh-- oh, yeah, I'm fine." Jongeun forces herself into smiling a little, and hopes that the gesture is at least a little reassuring. Juyeon is, apparently, pacified by this, and nods in Yutao's direction. "What were we saying, though?"
"Juyeon was asking what happened to you," Yutao says, eyebrows raised, indicating a particular significance.
Jongeun's heart leaps at the thought. She doesn't want to remember what it felt like to appear in one place after having been in another, doesn't want to remember the thousand hands that touched her skin in ways she'd never been touched before. Despite her fears and anxieties, she describes the experience in as great detail as she can remember to Juyeon and Yutao, who watch her with wide eyes and slightly-open mouths.
When the story is finished, Juyeon bites down on her bottom lip, brows tenting together. "That...sounds legitimate," she admits, picking at a piece of the carpet between her blunted fingernails. "Yutao, you've done well."
Yutao's all enthusiasm, eyes curling up into cute little crescent moons as she breaks into a broad grin. "I am happy to have done well!" she exclaims, jumping up and wrapping her arms around Jongeun and smushing their cheeks together affectionately. There's no way Yutao doesn't feel the heat rising in Jongeun's face, a product of not liking being touched by girls who are much, much cuter than she.
If they're gonna be spending a lot of time together, and Jongeun supposes, judging by the approving look on Juyeon's face, that they are, then there will have to be boundaries set down. Preventative measures taken. She can't be popping girl-chubby every time the overly-affectionate girl resting on her shoulders decides that something's been done well. It's a recipe for trouble.
So, very calmly, she removes Yutao's hands from her person, tugs gently at the hem of her skirt in an attempt to readjust. Leaning back, Yutao blinks, rocking onto her hands. "So, um, is there anyone who can tell me how to get home this late...?" she asks, coughing a little bit to mask the end of her sentence. "I mean...I live kinda far, and the bus has stopped running, and I don't know what to do..."
"Couldn't you just teleport?" Juyeon asks with a tilt of her head.
"I don't even know how I did it the first time," Jongeun complains, lolling her head a bit herself, palms digging into the carpet. "Which is annoying. Do you know what it's like to do something right the first time and then never be able to figure out how to do it right again?"
"Yeah," Juyeon says as if the answer's obvious, shrugging and glancing away.
"I just wanted to go home," Jongeun sighs, dramatic, flopping onto her belly, chin burrowed in the thick shag carpeting that seats all three of them.
Yutao, apparently lacking in a fundamental understanding of the idea of personal space, flops down right next to Jongeun, resting an arm over her, fingertips skating at the small of her back, which tickles more than it normally would because of the material of her dance uniform. Jongeun seizes up, pinching her eyes closed as the sore muscles in her arms and back and legs tense up and feel as if they're on fire.
She could swear she feels the hands brush her skin again, and she's got a scream ready to burst forth from her lungs and disrupt whatever semblance of peace there is here in case she is doing it again, but when she opens her eyes she's still face-first in the ugly brown carpet, Yutao's still draped over her, and she's still hurting from the last time, from the exertion of practice, of teleporting, of extreme displays of emotion.
Juyeon's voice is in her ear. "You can sleep here tonight," she promises Jongeun, a whisper into the shell of the younger girl's ear. "We'll just have to sneak you out in the morning."
And here Jongeun had taken Juyeon for kind of a bitch.
The elder sits at the edge of her bed, humming softly while tugging on pyjama pants under her school uniform before slipping out of the skirt and laying it neatly over the back of a desk chair. As she watches from the corner of her eye this entire little routine, snatching as much as she can before Juyeon ducks into the bathroom, Jongeun is acutely aware of the fact that she hasn't stopped blushing for the duration of this entire visit. Something about being around pretty girls does that to her.
She really, really wishes that Yutao weren't sleeping on top of her, though. All she can think about is indecency, and she can hear her mother's voice in the back of her mind, shrieking that she needs to stay pure. Hey, at least dance won't be the reason.
According to the bright-green lights of Juyeon's alarm clock, it is 3:57AM when Yutao accidentally awakens her, a fit of twitches and shivers beside her. The other girl's skin, where exposed, is chilly to the touch, and she's mumbling something under her breath, unintelligible but assuredly terrifying. "Hey," Jongeun murmurs, hand at Yutao's shoulder, shaking her carefully, knowing that it's kind of dangerous to rouse someone in that deep a sleep. "Hey, wake up, please."
The words turn into high-pitched whimpers and now Juyeon's awake, sitting ramshod in bed, staring over at the two of them. "Is it happening again?" she asks softly, like Jongeun's supposed to know what in hell's name that means.
Yutao reaches out for human contact, and Jongeun's the victim by default. The situation would seem more serious except for the fact that she's practically delirious with exhaustion, and literally nothing is serious to her right now. She's too tired to even resist, in fact, and instead just takes the taller girl into her arms, frowning deeply as she does so. Yutao comes to slowly, but surely, and with a sob she buries her nose in Jongeun's neck.
Without hesitation, something that surprises even her, Jongeun idly strokes at Yutao's hair, watches as her fingers disappear amidst a sea of blonde, and even goes so far as to kiss the older's temple. Anything to make her stop crying; there's no good way to get tears out of spandex other than just falling asleep that way, and she's not sure she could do it even if she wanted to.
"'Tao...?" Juyeon whispers, crawling out of bed and over to them. She brushes her fingers along the line of Yutao's jaw affectionately, and the blonde goes limp, crashing into Juyeon's tiny, hunched-over form.
"I love you, Juyeon," she breathes, eyes fluttering closed, and Juyeon presses her lips to the dead-center of Yutao's forehead.
"I love you too, pretty girl," Juyeon reassures her. "Tell me about it in the morning, okay? You need to sleep right now." Then she gently adjusts the both of them so that Yutao is curled into Jongeun's side, snoring lightly, apparently undisturbed by her own disturbance. "Hey, so, um," Juyeon starts, reaching out and tucking a strand of hair behind Jongeun's ear for her. "If she gets like that again, and she might but I don't know that she will for sure, but if she does, just...hold her through it? You did pretty well a minute ago, and I really...really need to sleep."
Just then it kind of sinks in with Jongeun that the older girl does look rather tired, with bags beginning to form under her eyes and a certain exhaustion even in her smiles, probably the real cause of her being so unbelievable when it comes to kindness. "Has she been staying with you?" Jongeun asks, lifting a hand so that she can brush a bit of the elder's bangs from her forehead.
"She's an exchange student," Juyeon admits shyly, looking down at the hole between her criss-crossed legs for a long minute before swinging swiftly up into bed. "My family is her family. So...having to take care of her isn't a big deal."
"Until you're not sleeping," Jongeun points out, only to earn a rather frustrated sigh from Juyeon. She listens to the sound of shifting sheets in the darkness, then lies back down, wrapping an arm around Yutao and pulling her in close. "You take care of yourself, okay? I-it's the least I can do for having you help me out."
She can't see, obviously; her back's to Juyeon, and the room is dark and for God's sake, it's four in the morning, they don't need to be conversing. But when Juyeon answers, "It won't be the last time, I'm sure," Jongeun is sure she can hear the other's smile in the way she speaks.
for the femmexo exchange. good god i love you guys. sorry it's messy and doesn't have much point i just? have? so many feelings about this 'verse? and didn't want to ramble on for eight thousand pages. bless.
The first time Jongeun teleports, she's not even entirely sure that she's in a different place. She considered it, at the time, a combination of mild depression and sheer exhaustion, but really it had a lot to do with the whole disorientation aspect of it. Being settled into one atmosphere only to be jerked into another does a number on a person, after all, especially when it's accompanied by the sensation of being felt up by a million complete strangers.
She's sitting outside the studio where she goes for extra dance practice -- always putting in the extra hours, she supposes, eyeing her much older comrades in rehearsal and noting that not a single one of them are a part of the company she's in at her high school -- with her schoolbag between her knees and her chin tucked into her chest when she realises that she's missed the last bus home by exactly three and a half minutes. While she, in all her politeness, is forced to acknowledge and even respect the punctuality that is the bus schedule, she still hangs her head in disappointment, knowing that she'll never be able to make it home. A glance overhead tells her that the night is far too long to call her parents and ask for a ride; they're not horribly into the fact that she spends more time practicing dance than taking cram school seriously, anyhow, and she'd hate to be a burden on them more than she already feels she is.
The people on the street, while scattered and quite alone and some rather intimidating, offer some promise; she's just about to think of talking to them, ever the optimist, when her one actual friend in the studio, the ultimately gorgeous and totally-crushworthy-if-Jongeun-were-into-perfect-people Hyoyeon, sits right next to her. "You did really well today," the older woman compliments softly, patting Jongeun on the shoulder.
Suddenly stricken with shyness, Jongeun tucks her chin into her chest to hide her smile and the blush that tickles at the apples of her cheeks. "Thank you," she answers in a mumble. "You were amazing, too, like you usually are."
"Usually?" Hyeyeon laughs, shaking her head, "No, today was pretty off for me. I couldn't keep count to save my life." She reaches out and taps Jongeun's temple fondly. "You're the one that everyone was watching."
"Like anyone would ever see me when someone like you is around." It comes off as a little bitter, but she can't help the way that the jealousy forces its way up her spine, straightening her so she doesn't look weak in front of her senior and, more importantly, competitor. "The auditions for the summer performances are coming up soon. I wouldn't be surprised if you got the lead."
Hyeyeon's quiet for a long while, then finally she nods, bumping Jongeun's shoulder with her own. "You missed the bus again, didn't you. D'you need a ride?"
And Jongeun really, really, really wants to say yes, but her pride, or at least what little she has, doesn't allow her, instead shoves the word right back down her throat. "No, I'm, um, waiting for my mom to come get me. I called her right before I hit the showers."
"Ah... alright!" And Hyeyeon's sunny, just enough to light up the darkness immediately surrounding them. "I'll see you on Friday, Jongeunnie. Please take care of yourself until then?"
There's a certain amount of shame that comes with rejecting a perfectly nice offer, but it disappears as soon as she's watching the sway of the older's hips as she walks away. Now she's biting her tongue, trying not to call out about how much her hatred fills her, how much she'd like to be the other female, to be that talented and gracious and amazing. She settles for a whisper. "I hate you."
Winching her eyes shut, she curls up on the ground, arms tucked neatly under her knees and chin tucked upon them, wishing she could be anywhere, literally anywhere but here. Her thumb brushes along the thick material of her dance costume, powder-pink tights, deep blue leotard, flowy white skirt. She looks like a cartoon, she supposes, except a cartoon in real life would more than likely get noticed, and probably a few offers from strangers for some assistance.
Why can't she be anywhere else?
A shudder runs through her and it feels like there are a thousand hands running over her skin, fingers brushing against places where she never thought to be touched, cold and clammy and not that different from death. Is she dying? Has something killed her and she hadn't even been paying attention to notice? She silently bemoans the impermanence of both her attention span and life at large -- she would be the person that didn't notice they were in some kind of brutal accident or something and just float on, untroubled, to the afterlife.
It's only when she hears the voice, high-pitched and dainty with the faintest hint of a lisp, that she opens her eyes -- and realises that she's not in the place she just was at all, though the surrounding isn't horribly different. Glancing down at herself, she pinches her stomach, winces at the contact -- okay, good, she isn't dead. Then she turns her attention in the direction of the complete stranger who's apparently been the only witness to this sudden change in geographical orientation. "Hey, what the hell," the voice says; Jongeun rests her eyes on the source, a (rather tall) girl, bleach-blonde, clad in black, face covered in piercings, shoulders smattered with artwork made of ink. "You weren't just here a second ago, were you?" Her speech is accented, cutely so, and it makes Jongeun want to taste every word that comes out of her mouth.
"I don't... think I was, no," Jongeun confesses breathlessly, shaking her head and staring down at the ground, trying her hardest not to notice that the stranger she'd probably scared is extremely pretty.
"How'd you do it...?" Except this girl doesn't look or sound scared at all. "I mean, that was...kind of amazing, yeah."
"Amazing?!" Jongeun's calm veneer, or what little of it she'd had, disappears in a high-pitched squeal. "No, that was not amazing, what's happening to me, why is everything in my life going weird, who are you and why aren't you freaked out--"
"Hey, hey," and the girl stoops beside her, fitting an arm around her shoulders and leaning in so close that her lips brush Jongeun's ear, "everything is...fine, yes."
"How can you say that," Jongeun sighs softly, hanging her head and quickly wriggling out of the embrace, happy to be away from any comfort that involves too much touching by a pretty girl whose name she has yet to learn. "You don't even know what happened to me. I don't even know what happened to me."
"I might," the girl says, careful of space now, keeping her arms tucked into her side. Her Korean is stilted, cautious, as if she's afraid she might accidentally say something awkward and offend Jongeun. "I mean... I don't know, some weird stuff has been happening to me lately. I have this friend who is going through the same thing."
Jongeun, concerned, reaches out and places her hand in the crook of the other girl's elbow, fingers drumming against the faint remnants of her pulse. "Tell me about it, then. I'm... I'm afraid. I don't want to be anything I can't control."
"You...may want to meet my friend, then," says the stranger, reaching out and brushing a strand of hair from Jongeun's forehead. "Come with me, I can take you to where she lives, and she can tell you more than I can."
"Another one?" Juyeon, the person in question, has this little wrinkle between her eyebrows, which doesn't befit someone who looks her age, at least in Jongeun's opinion. The older girl rubs her forehead with her palm, then tugs the blanket up around her, using her bottom lip to blow her blunted, blondish bangs from her eyes. "That's the third one this week, Yutao, you're going to need to stop bringing them over whenever you find them. Especially if you don't know whether or not their powers, if that's what they are, are real. The other day you brought someone to my house because you saw two cats follow them all the way home."
"But--" Yutao's studded lower lip juts out in about the cutest pout Jongeun's ever seen in her life. "I just...thought I would help. Especially cat girl."
"'Cat girl' had a name," Juyeon reminds Yutao, patient though her feelings are clearly wearing thin. "Her name was Hyeri and she had her leftover lunch dishes in her bag, which is why she had cats on her. They were following the smell of kimbap until they got fed."
Yutao looks embarrassed, glancing down at her hands, where she's wearing about seven rings and as many bracelets. Jongeun's overwhelmed with the possibility that she might actually be able to hold them without wanting to be ill, Yutao has been that sweet to her. She kind of zones out, actually, tracing the lines of Yutao's black manicure, eyebrows pinched together as she contemplates learning the shape of each of those fingers with her own--
"Jongeun?" Yutao is asking, lifting her hand right out of Jongeun's line of vision to snap her fingers in front of the younger's face. "Hey, are you alright?"
"Huh-- oh, yeah, I'm fine." Jongeun forces herself into smiling a little, and hopes that the gesture is at least a little reassuring. Juyeon is, apparently, pacified by this, and nods in Yutao's direction. "What were we saying, though?"
"Juyeon was asking what happened to you," Yutao says, eyebrows raised, indicating a particular significance.
Jongeun's heart leaps at the thought. She doesn't want to remember what it felt like to appear in one place after having been in another, doesn't want to remember the thousand hands that touched her skin in ways she'd never been touched before. Despite her fears and anxieties, she describes the experience in as great detail as she can remember to Juyeon and Yutao, who watch her with wide eyes and slightly-open mouths.
When the story is finished, Juyeon bites down on her bottom lip, brows tenting together. "That...sounds legitimate," she admits, picking at a piece of the carpet between her blunted fingernails. "Yutao, you've done well."
Yutao's all enthusiasm, eyes curling up into cute little crescent moons as she breaks into a broad grin. "I am happy to have done well!" she exclaims, jumping up and wrapping her arms around Jongeun and smushing their cheeks together affectionately. There's no way Yutao doesn't feel the heat rising in Jongeun's face, a product of not liking being touched by girls who are much, much cuter than she.
If they're gonna be spending a lot of time together, and Jongeun supposes, judging by the approving look on Juyeon's face, that they are, then there will have to be boundaries set down. Preventative measures taken. She can't be popping girl-chubby every time the overly-affectionate girl resting on her shoulders decides that something's been done well. It's a recipe for trouble.
So, very calmly, she removes Yutao's hands from her person, tugs gently at the hem of her skirt in an attempt to readjust. Leaning back, Yutao blinks, rocking onto her hands. "So, um, is there anyone who can tell me how to get home this late...?" she asks, coughing a little bit to mask the end of her sentence. "I mean...I live kinda far, and the bus has stopped running, and I don't know what to do..."
"Couldn't you just teleport?" Juyeon asks with a tilt of her head.
"I don't even know how I did it the first time," Jongeun complains, lolling her head a bit herself, palms digging into the carpet. "Which is annoying. Do you know what it's like to do something right the first time and then never be able to figure out how to do it right again?"
"Yeah," Juyeon says as if the answer's obvious, shrugging and glancing away.
"I just wanted to go home," Jongeun sighs, dramatic, flopping onto her belly, chin burrowed in the thick shag carpeting that seats all three of them.
Yutao, apparently lacking in a fundamental understanding of the idea of personal space, flops down right next to Jongeun, resting an arm over her, fingertips skating at the small of her back, which tickles more than it normally would because of the material of her dance uniform. Jongeun seizes up, pinching her eyes closed as the sore muscles in her arms and back and legs tense up and feel as if they're on fire.
She could swear she feels the hands brush her skin again, and she's got a scream ready to burst forth from her lungs and disrupt whatever semblance of peace there is here in case she is doing it again, but when she opens her eyes she's still face-first in the ugly brown carpet, Yutao's still draped over her, and she's still hurting from the last time, from the exertion of practice, of teleporting, of extreme displays of emotion.
Juyeon's voice is in her ear. "You can sleep here tonight," she promises Jongeun, a whisper into the shell of the younger girl's ear. "We'll just have to sneak you out in the morning."
And here Jongeun had taken Juyeon for kind of a bitch.
The elder sits at the edge of her bed, humming softly while tugging on pyjama pants under her school uniform before slipping out of the skirt and laying it neatly over the back of a desk chair. As she watches from the corner of her eye this entire little routine, snatching as much as she can before Juyeon ducks into the bathroom, Jongeun is acutely aware of the fact that she hasn't stopped blushing for the duration of this entire visit. Something about being around pretty girls does that to her.
She really, really wishes that Yutao weren't sleeping on top of her, though. All she can think about is indecency, and she can hear her mother's voice in the back of her mind, shrieking that she needs to stay pure. Hey, at least dance won't be the reason.
According to the bright-green lights of Juyeon's alarm clock, it is 3:57AM when Yutao accidentally awakens her, a fit of twitches and shivers beside her. The other girl's skin, where exposed, is chilly to the touch, and she's mumbling something under her breath, unintelligible but assuredly terrifying. "Hey," Jongeun murmurs, hand at Yutao's shoulder, shaking her carefully, knowing that it's kind of dangerous to rouse someone in that deep a sleep. "Hey, wake up, please."
The words turn into high-pitched whimpers and now Juyeon's awake, sitting ramshod in bed, staring over at the two of them. "Is it happening again?" she asks softly, like Jongeun's supposed to know what in hell's name that means.
Yutao reaches out for human contact, and Jongeun's the victim by default. The situation would seem more serious except for the fact that she's practically delirious with exhaustion, and literally nothing is serious to her right now. She's too tired to even resist, in fact, and instead just takes the taller girl into her arms, frowning deeply as she does so. Yutao comes to slowly, but surely, and with a sob she buries her nose in Jongeun's neck.
Without hesitation, something that surprises even her, Jongeun idly strokes at Yutao's hair, watches as her fingers disappear amidst a sea of blonde, and even goes so far as to kiss the older's temple. Anything to make her stop crying; there's no good way to get tears out of spandex other than just falling asleep that way, and she's not sure she could do it even if she wanted to.
"'Tao...?" Juyeon whispers, crawling out of bed and over to them. She brushes her fingers along the line of Yutao's jaw affectionately, and the blonde goes limp, crashing into Juyeon's tiny, hunched-over form.
"I love you, Juyeon," she breathes, eyes fluttering closed, and Juyeon presses her lips to the dead-center of Yutao's forehead.
"I love you too, pretty girl," Juyeon reassures her. "Tell me about it in the morning, okay? You need to sleep right now." Then she gently adjusts the both of them so that Yutao is curled into Jongeun's side, snoring lightly, apparently undisturbed by her own disturbance. "Hey, so, um," Juyeon starts, reaching out and tucking a strand of hair behind Jongeun's ear for her. "If she gets like that again, and she might but I don't know that she will for sure, but if she does, just...hold her through it? You did pretty well a minute ago, and I really...really need to sleep."
Just then it kind of sinks in with Jongeun that the older girl does look rather tired, with bags beginning to form under her eyes and a certain exhaustion even in her smiles, probably the real cause of her being so unbelievable when it comes to kindness. "Has she been staying with you?" Jongeun asks, lifting a hand so that she can brush a bit of the elder's bangs from her forehead.
"She's an exchange student," Juyeon admits shyly, looking down at the hole between her criss-crossed legs for a long minute before swinging swiftly up into bed. "My family is her family. So...having to take care of her isn't a big deal."
"Until you're not sleeping," Jongeun points out, only to earn a rather frustrated sigh from Juyeon. She listens to the sound of shifting sheets in the darkness, then lies back down, wrapping an arm around Yutao and pulling her in close. "You take care of yourself, okay? I-it's the least I can do for having you help me out."
She can't see, obviously; her back's to Juyeon, and the room is dark and for God's sake, it's four in the morning, they don't need to be conversing. But when Juyeon answers, "It won't be the last time, I'm sure," Jongeun is sure she can hear the other's smile in the way she speaks.